


this rough magic

by lindentree



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Coming of Age, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Sex Work, Magic, Male-Female Friendship, Murder, POV Arya Stark, Post-Canon, Road Trips, Robbery, Sailing, Sexual Harassment, Shipwrecks, Survival, Symbolism, Taverns, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:27:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21564529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindentree/pseuds/lindentree
Summary: Arya discovers what lies west of Westeros.A post-series Gendrya fix-it fic.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Comments: 78
Kudos: 147





	1. the bottom of the sea

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is completely just me trying to make sense of the characterization that happened in S8. It's strictly wrestling with the televised canon, not the novels, and that's it.
> 
> I started writing this immediately after the finale aired, intending to post it once the entire fic was complete. I got sidetracked working on some other things over the summer and into autumn, but I've been trying to complete this and wanted to share a portion of what I have so far. It's going to be multi-chapter, but not epic. I'm hoping to keep it to no more than five parts, but no promises. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! Thanks to M and Lisa for being my first readers and letting me know when I need to use a period, already.
> 
> Your soundtrack for this part at least is [Oracle of the Maritimes by Neko Case.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ9tG4GPfEM)

_I have bedimm’d_   
_The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,_   
_And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault_   
_Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder_   
_Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak_   
_With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory_   
_Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up_   
_The pine and cedar: graves at my command_   
_Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth_   
_By my so potent art. But this rough magic_   
_I here abjure, and, when I have required_   
_Some heavenly music, which even now I do,_   
_To work mine end upon their senses that_   
_This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,_   
_Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,_   
_And deeper than did ever plummet sound_   
_I’ll drown my book._

-William Shakespeare, _The Tempest_

**I**

**_the bottom of the sea_ **

Arya discovers what lies west of Westeros.

She instructs her captain to chart a course to the outlying islands of Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya, the farthest mapped points west of Lonely Light in the Sunset Sea. She’d read about them, when she was small, about how they were discovered more than two hundred years ago by Lady Alys Westhill of House Farman. The islands were said to be inhabited by strange creatures and lush with enormous plants and trees whose branches bow under the weight of fruit and nuts. It's an ideal place to stop and re-supply the ship before sailing into the unknown west.

They have clear weather once they pass through a storm at Shipbreaker Bay and sail about the Broken Arm of Dorne to Sunspear, where they stop for supplies. Her ship is fast and light, deftly carrying Arya and her crew for days across the calm, blue-green waters that lap at the soaring cliffs of the Dornish coast. There’s hardly any sign of winter, here. Massive frigate birds the size of small horses follow the ship the first several days, flying high above the sails like wide-winged kites, until they finally fall away as the ship passes The Arbor and they leave Westeros behind.

Pods of nimble, bottle-nosed creatures swim alongside the ship’s hull, breaking the surface to chirp their strange language to one another. Fish with broad fins like wings leap into the air as well, their scales flashing silver.

The air is cold and salty, and Arya imagines she's no longer a wolf but a great seabird: fast and strong and unbound to the land. Unbound to the past, to family, to justice or vengeance or duty or love.

Arya expects to feel free, but she doesn’t. Instead, she feels blunted and dull, like an overused blade. She stands at the bow of her ship looking out at the endless waves as the wind chaps her face raw, and she waits for her heart to feel light.

It doesn’t.

The seventh morning out on the open sea dawns still and lovely, the sun bright against a clear sky.

"Fine day for it, milady," one of the sailors says to her, grinning as he hauls a coil of heavy rope onto one shoulder. His face is deeply scored by laugh lines, and his ruddy complexion makes his merry green eyes vivid.

Arya smiles faintly back at him, and nods, taking a deep breath of the fresh, cool morning air.

At midday, the boatswain's voice calling to his crewmates draws Arya up out of her cabin. Her captain meets her on the deck, and they take turns peering through the spyglass at the horizon.

Ahead are enormous, sharp rocks piercing the surface of the sea, dotting the horizon, stretching to the north and the south as far as she can see. Large gaps separate the rocks, leaving spans of open water like the valleys between mountains.

The wind is up and the currents are swift, but her captain is not easily intimidated. They sail quickly to the edge of this rocky belt, her captain shouting to his men as they guide her ship between the rocks.

But when Arya goes to the starboard side and looks down the hull to the water below, she sees ships. There are hundreds of ships beneath the pale, clear water, gored open and hunched like the carcasses of slaughtered beasts.

The squall comes at them out of the north like an arrow loosed from a bow. The sky turns black and cracks with flashes of lightning and booms of thunder, and the sea rolls beneath the ship. When Arya sees the grim crease of the captain's brow and the panic in the first mate's eyes, it strikes her that she does not know or trust the fortitude of even one single man on this ship.

It strikes her that, aside from the captain and first mate, she doesn’t even know their names.

Once, she knew the name of every person at Winterfell, from serving girls to stableboys, as well as countless folk in the winter town, no matter how humble. The girl who befriended the butcher’s boy and always had a friendly greeting for the smallfolk feels as remote now as Winterfell itself.

The captain assures her he's seen his share of storms, though, and bids her to wait the gale out in her cabin, where she won't be underfoot.

Arya has no choice but to heed him. It's galling, but her short time aboard this ship has afforded her only the most novice knowledge of sailing in the gentlest weather, and she hasn't the skills to see a ship through a storm this wild. She waits in her dark cabin, the sea too violent to risk a candle, and listens to the fury of the winds and rain as they batter her ship.

When the waves slam the ship against the rocks, Arya stumbles, falling to the floor, and barely has time to pick herself up and dash above deck before sea water rushes into the ship from below.

Lightning flashes across the sky, illuminating the chaos before her. The sailors scramble to hold to their posts as the ship lists hard to starboard and waves wash over the deck, dragging men into the sea. Above it all, whipping wildly in the wind, the direwolf's head sail has already been torn in two.

The sound of the ship breaking apart is ear-splitting even over the roar of the wind and the waves and the rain. It sounds like the earth is rending itself in two as the masthead cracks and topples like the enormous tree it once was, hitting the rolling surface of the sea with the might of a giant's hammer.

The direwolf's head disappears into the black water.

Stunned, Arya staggers on the heaving deck as the sea and the rocks and the wind rend her little ship to pieces as if it were made of matchsticks, and she watches the crew abandon her, leaping hopelessly overboard into the churning water.

 _Their names_ , she thinks again. _I never learnt their names._

It’s a stupefying thought to have in that moment, as she watches the sea suck them under, but it’s what she thinks about. That she never learnt their names.

Something smacks her hard in the back of the head, knocking the wind out of her, and she only has time to register a ringing in her ears and the taste of blood in her mouth before the black sea rushes up to meet her.

Arya does not know what happens to her then.

When she wakes, it's upon unmoving ground. She feels sand under her cheek, and the sensation of something trying to work its way into her open mouth.

She opens her eyes on a gang of tiny, blue and yellow-green crabs climbing curiously over her face and pinching at her dry lips with their pincers.

Flinching back in horror, she sits up and slaps at herself as the creatures fall aside, as surprised as she, waving their claws at her as they scuttle back out of her reach. She gasps, trying to catch her breath.

She's washed ashore on a little beach, her lower half still submerged in the shallow water, what's left of her damp clothes clinging to her itching skin. Wet tangles of hair hang in her face. Her cloak and her shoes are gone, and her dagger and Needle, as well, though she finds her small leather pouch full of gold dragons has stayed firmly tied to her belt.

Arya rolls onto her hands and knees, shivering from the cold and her head spinning, a dull throbbing at the back of her skull. She pauses for a moment, digging her fingers into the wet sand and breathing through the pain and disorientation until she can stagger shakily to her feet.

The sky is steel grey and dense with cloud, the horizon veiled by thick fog. All is silent around her but for the wash of the waves on the stony beach and the whistle of the sea breeze in her ears.

The island is small, windswept and treeless, its shoreline scalloped with beaches and slender coves where the sea breaks between jagged spikes of rock. It's little more than a narrow spit of land; she can see clear across it, and it’s only the length of perhaps three tiltyards arranged in a row.

For a moment, she recalls the harbour in Braavos, the same fishy saltwater and rotting kelp smell in her nose as she tried to force herself to drop Needle to the murky bottom of the Narrow Sea.

She’d thought that standing on that pier in Braavos was the most alone she’d ever been, but the House of Black and White and the city’s crowded markets full of strangers cannot compare to this island.

She is alone here; none of the crew has washed ashore with her.

Once she gets her feet under her, she walks around the island to see whether there's any fresh water. She looks to the horizon for passing ships, but the heavy fog makes it impossible to see. Besides, for all she knows, this island is west of the jagged rocks that wrecked her ship, and she's beyond the reach of even the most skilled of sailors.

It occurs to her that she ought to be panicked. She ought to be frightened to find herself shipwrecked and alone in an unfamiliar and uninhabitable place. She finds she's terribly calm, though, and she walks the span of the island looking for a source of fresh water. Several large, nearly flat boulders in the centre of the island have deep divots in them, enough to collect small amounts of rain water. She scoops as much of the cold, iron-tasting water as she can in her cupped hands, then laps the rest up like a cat, hoping it's not the sort of still water that can make a person ill.

When she’s drunk all the water, she curls up on one of the flatter boulders to avoid the curious crabs, and she falls asleep.

She wakes to darkness, the stars so bright and close that it seems like she could reach up and pluck them from the sky like fruit from a tree.

She's also very cold, so she hugs her knees to her chest and thinks of the nights she spent sleeping in the woods in the Riverlands on the way to the Night's Watch, and later, with the Brotherhood.

With Gendry.

Gendry used to sleep close to her after she told him who she truly was. They never discussed it, but he did it, and she knew it was because he feared rapers, even if she didn't. He slept at her back, facing her or not, but always an arm's length away and with a weapon close by, just in case.

There was a cold night or two when she was feeling especially low, grieving her father and missing her mother and brothers and even Sansa, longing for Nymeria's warm fur, that she'd shifted closer to him, almost touching, and he'd allowed it, sharing his own abundant warmth with her as she shivered her way through the night. He never said a word about it, not even to tease her. Not even years later when they huddled together again, in a completely different way, during the coldest night imaginable, his bare skin hot against hers and his fur-lined cloak covering her.

On that night, his hands were big and warm, and his eyes were like fire, and to think of him now makes something raw ache deep down in the heart of her.

Arya shakes with the cold, aching all over, and falls asleep on the bare rock, holding herself tightly, her cheeks dry.

***

Rainfall wakes her.

She curses, rolling clumsily off the boulder and onto her feet, the back of her head still throbbing. As she stands shivering in the downpour and considers the lack of shelter the island offers, she lifts a hand to the back of her head and feels something crusted in her hair before she explores too boldly and yelps in pain. Her fingers come away filthy with brownish old blood, made wet by the rain.

Arya trudges to the shore and scoops a handful of seawater up to rinse the blood out. The skin is still open, for the salty water stings so badly it brings tears to her eyes and she curses again.

She withstands it, though, rinsing the wound repeatedly until the water runs clear and her fingers come away with only a trace of fresh blood. She gingerly explores her scalp, numbed by the cold water, and finds the skin is split, but not very deeply. Not that it would matter much if it was — she has no way to stitch any sort of gash, anyway.

So she walks along the shore in an attempt to keep warm in the rain, and she watches the tiny crabs claw their way across the stones to pick at the remains of a fish carcass washed up in the shallows.

As she walks, she passes a little cove shaped like a wolf's tooth. Some wreckage has become lodged in the rocks there, pushed in by the relentless waves.

Arya hauls the wreckage out and onto the shore: pieces of decking and hull, a caved-in barrel, and dozens of unidentifiable scraps of wood, large and small. She gathers it all, and it's only when she's standing knee-deep in the shallows looking for any last remains that she happens to see something beneath the waves that catches the light, glittering like a jewel.

Before her hand even reaches out to extract it from the rocks and sand, she knows what she's found.

 _Needle_.

Arya holds the dripping sliver of steel in her hand and marvels, laughing aloud to herself, that her faithful little sword has managed to make even this journey with her.

When someone finds this island and her dry bones, at least she will have Needle by her side.

Arya manages to drag the wreckage to the middle of the island where the boulders have been refilled by the rain. She drinks again before starting to construct a shelter out of the waterlogged wreckage, the boulders providing one side of the structure.

The rain tapers off, eventually, and Arya becomes lightheaded and has to sit down for a moment inside the damp, ramshackle little shelter. It reminds her of a lean-to fort Jon built once in the woods at Winterfell, when they were both very young, and how she was the only other person who knew about it. The only other person he invited to see his hiding place.

Arya wonders what Jon is doing now, at what remains of The Wall. She wishes she could talk to him again, and tell him that Needle can swim. But not even the hardiest raven can connect them, now.

The dizziness abates, eventually, but as it does, Arya realises that she is painfully hungry, and she puts Needle to work.

She skewers four of the little crabs before the lot of them realise they're being hunted and flee hastily towards the sea. She crushes their shells between rocks and pries the meat out of each one. It tastes all right, though she’s found a powerful hunger can make almost any hog swill taste delicious.

The crab meat fills her empty stomach, at least, and, after lapping more water from the boulders, she crawls inside her damp little den and curls up in a ball.

“I’m not afraid,” she says. The wind off the sea rattles her shelter. She repeats the words to herself, again and again.

_I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid._

Arya knows if she can only repeat them enough, she’ll believe them.

She falls asleep gripping Needle in one hand.

***

Days pass, and cold nights where she longs for the fur-lined robes of her youth and the cloak she lost to the sea.

She eats the crabs and drinks the rain water in the boulders, and by some stroke of fortune, she doesn't fall ill. The wound on her head heals until it hardly hurts at all anymore and she stops getting dizzy every time she stands up.

She finds stones that create sparks when smacked together, but there’s no wood on the island aside from what she’s used to make her shelter. Instead, she gathers tangled heaps of the thick, dark brown kelp washed up on the shore, and spreads it out across the rocks further inland to dry. She bundles the long weeds into braided sticks and burns them like firewood, and finds that chewing on salty strips of the stuff is enough to keep hunger at bay whenever the crabs make themselves scarce.

Sitting in her shelter on rainy nights and burning smoky little fires to keep herself warm is almost enough to help her forget that she's all alone, and will die in this place, and that she will never see her sister or brothers again.

She will never see Gendry again.

It's strange to think that, only short months ago, she was resigned to dying. The long, nearly silent ride to King’s Landing with Sandor was spent getting comfortable with it, and by the time she was in the besieged Red Keep, she had only one thought: _yes, today._

Then, Sandor cuffed her with one huge hand and shook her, and she chose to live.

Now, she mourns for herself, for all the years she might have lived had she not set foot on that ship. She mourns for the nameless men whose faces haunt her, men she tempted away from their families with gold that they took with them to the bottom of the sea. All because she was determined to go where no one had gone before, because she could not seem to face going back to where she’d been.

Sitting with her bare toes tucked in the warm sand before her fire, she wonders if she ever really stopped expecting to die. If she had really listened to what Sandor tried to tell her before going to meet his own end.

She’s always known that lone wolves die. A crew of strangers paid in gold isn’t the same thing as a pack. It’s not the same thing as family, or a faithful friend.

The fire warms her, and she sleeps beside it that night with her jaw clenched tight and her nose pressed to the inside of her wrist.

In her dreams, ash falls like snow from the sky, and when she looks to the east, she sees a white horse emerging from the sea, saltwater dripping from its quivering hide.

In her dreams, a voice like the urgent clanging of bells thunders far across the sky to land in her ears as a whisper:

_Not today._

***

More days pass, and still there are no ships.

Arya's going to die here, she knows. But every morning she rises and laps the night's dew from the boulders, spears a few of the little crabs, and she scans what’s visible of the fog-shrouded horizon, anyway.

Every morning, she says _not today_.

She keeps drying the kelp that the sea keeps coughing up, braiding it into thin sticks for her fire. She chews on long, crispy strips of it while she sits on the stony beach and stares at the sea until her eyes sting and weep.

Sometimes she thinks she can hear seabirds calling, but she never sees any in the sky, and begins to believe it's simply her own mind playing tricks on her.

The Ironborn would likely say the shipwreck was the work of the Drowned God, who must have wanted her crew of good sailors for his own. But Arya knows that there is only one god, and she wonders why Death didn’t choose that day, when she made herself so easy to take.

She grips Needle in her fist and spars with the air, practicing the old forms Syrio had taught her. It's a waste of her energy and she's not certain why she bothers, but still she does, every evening, as the sun melts into the hazy orange and coral horizon.

The sparring helps to wear her body out so that sleep comes easier, some nights, though her mind tends to get in the way. Aching for sleep, she lies in her shelter with her head in the entranceway so she can see the moon, and she thinks of Winterfell. She thinks of her brothers. Her sister. Gendry.

She misses them. Her throat goes tight and her eyes prickle and she has to dig a canine into her bottom lip to keep her tears at bay.

In the dark of the night, she wonders how it’s possible she chose to leave them behind when she'd only just found them.

Yet it was only too easy. It was much easier than the alternatives. It was easier to get on a ship and sail away than it was to stay in King’s Landing with Bran and join his small council, to play tiresome politics with her enigmatic brother in the dusty, devastated city where she had watched her father die. Or to return to Winterfell with Sansa, to be her sister’s protector and executioner, her _henchman_ , sleeping every night in the same chamber where a wild little girl used to batter her bedstead with a wooden sword, forever the true lady’s strange, unnatural sister.

Neither fate appealed to her, and, not long after the council at the Dragon Pit, she knew there was no place in Westeros for her. There was no familiar place she could stand to be.

It was something in Bran’s eyes when he looked at her and she knew he could see things she didn’t want anyone she loved to have to see. It was the expression on Sansa’s face when she’d found the bag of faces. It was the way Jon looked at her when she saw him again for the first time in years in the Godswood, the way he wondered aloud how she could have snuck up on him.

To say nothing of Gendry, still a stupid boy after all these years, who’d foolishly used words like _love_ and _beautiful_ , but was bound to realise she wasn’t the same girl he once knew in the Riverlands, if he ever learned the things she’d done.

It was too much. She couldn't bear to stay where they could see her. Better to leave while she was still someone almost admirable in their eyes, before they looked too long, too deeply, and saw the truth.

For she’d done ugly things. Ugly and necessary. Everything she’d done needed doing, and she'd do it all again, choosing nothing different. She sees, though, why it would have been better for No One to have done those things.

If she'd been No One, it wouldn't have mattered to her, the way Sansa looked at her sometimes, curious and wary and halfway repulsed. The way Jon looked at her like she was a stranger. The way Bran looked at her like he just _knew_.

It wouldn't have mattered, the way Gendry's eyes went soft and sad when he saw the ugly scars on her body.

If she’d been No One, nothing would have touched her. All of her secrets might have remained locked away in the darkness of her heart.

Instead, she is Arya Stark of Winterfell, a name she thought she could outrun on the back of a fleet ship.

But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She sees now that she cannot outrun anything, for it’s all washed up on the shore of this island with her.

When she closes her eyes, she sees fire and ash and blood, and a white horse, flinching with fear, trembling with hope.

She sees deep blue eyes that glow warm like a forge.

Arya allows herself to think of him, of his eyes on hers and his strong hands spanning her hips. She thinks of how it felt when she took him inside her: pinching and stretching and good, _so good_ , so much better than she had guessed it would. The way he kept muttering her name, his lips brushing her collarbone, his voice so surprised, like she’d astonished him. She thinks of the way his hands rocked her hips into him until she picked up the way of it and took off, took over, bracing herself and fucking him until they were both breathless and gasping. Until he rolled his thumb gently against her where their bodies met, and something inside her snapped and pulsed and pulled him along with her as he panted against her sweaty chest, against her racing heart, and she felt him spend inside her.

She thinks of how it felt when he shuddered against her, hands flexing where he held her hips, and _laughed_ , a soft sound of joy against her collarbone.

Lying in her damp shelter and thinking of him and that night, she realises her face is wet. Her eyes have overflowed and her face is wet with tears. She cannot remember the last time she allowed herself to really cry, but she does now, sobbing raggedly to the empty night.

Outside her shelter, the sea washes against the stony shore.

That night, sleep doesn’t come for a long time.

***

One ordinary afternoon when the wind is up and the fog has lifted, Arya sees a ship.

It's little more than a smudge on the eastern horizon, and for one wild, spine-tingling moment, she's certain it must be a ghost ship, its crew cursed to wander the seas forever.

But she hears the cackling of seabirds on the breeze, and she doesn't think it's a ghost ship at all.

Arya runs to her store of dried kelp and quickly builds a fire by the beach where she washed ashore. She throws all of the dried kelp on it, even though she hasn't seen any crabs in days, and, in desperation, she takes the roof and walls of her shanty apart and throws all of it on the fire as well.

It catches quickly, and a great pillar of flames and dark smoke rises into the sky. All she can do is watch the ship as it crawls across the horizon and hope that the man on watch is eagle-eyed.

Arya sits atop the boulders in the centre of the island and stares at the ship. For the longest time, it remains far off, and she's sure it's going to continue on its course and pass her by altogether.

But very slowly, it begins to grow larger as it approaches the island, until its indistinct shape sharpens into that of a small fishing vessel, dogged by a flock of determined gulls.

The ship stops off the island, and she gets to her feet as it drops anchor, and a small dinghy is lowered over the side.

Arya is halfway bewildered to see another person after so long on her own. She doesn't even know how much time has passed since her ship was wrecked. It's strange to see the two slouched figures in the little rowboat as it approaches the shore.

Gripping Needle's hilt, she hops down from the boulders.

"Ho there, lad!" cries a voice from the boat as its hull scrapes against the stones and it comes to a stop in the surf.

She scowls, wondering how bedraggled she must look, and approaches the rowboat. In it is an older fellow with a hunched back and a white beard, and a boy working the oars.

"I'm not a lad," she says, her voice husky from disuse.

"Beggin' your pardon, miss," says the man, while the boy just stares, his mouth hanging open. "How long have you been stranded here?"

"I wouldn't know. We set sail from King's Landing three weeks before our ship was wrecked in a storm somewhere in the Sunset Sea. I thought I must have washed up far into the west, for I've seen no ships."

The man laughs, a sound like a squeaky door.

“Why, you must have gone terribly off course somewhere along the way, miss. You’re only three leagues off the coast of Westeros, or thereabouts! You ought to be able to see the lights at Oldtown, on a clear night.”

Three leagues. Three short, bloody leagues from Westeros.

Arya grinds her back teeth together. "Nobody can see three leagues on a clear night, or any other night."

"Well, there haven't been many clear nights of late, I'll grant you that, miss."

They take her aboard the dinghy and row back to their ship. The boy gapes at her as he rows, while the man talks, taking occasional sips from a small bottle of brown liquor in his coat.

“You’re lucky we come this far out,” he says as they approach the hull of the small fishing vessel. “We wouldn’t, normally, but stocks have been low this season, closer to shore.”

Arya nods absently, looking over the man’s head up at the ship. About a dozen men hang over the sides to get a look at the castaway their crewmates have found. It’s difficult to look at them, somehow, their sun-baked, peering faces reminding her sharply of her dead crew.

“Don’t mind them, miss. Some folk are superstitious about a woman on board, but don’t let it bother you none.”

They climb the rope ladder thrown down from above, and Arya is hauled aboard by a couple of young sailors who stink of sweat and fish. Of course, she can only guess how foul she too must smell, by now.

The crew of the _Anemone_ gawk at her, suspicious and curious, but the captain is courteous enough, and tells her that they plan to sail back to Oldtown the next morning. Arya offers them some of her gold dragons for her passage, but the captain won’t accept, and the crew soon return, muttering, to their work.

Arya sits atop a crate on the deck, one hand on Needle’s pommel, her bare, dirty heels drumming the wooden slats, and watches the crew pointedly ignore her as they haul large nets full of slick, flopping fish onboard.

When the sun sets, a sailor brings her a mug of ale and a dry, salty biscuit, but he won't speak to her or meet her eyes.

Arya could tell them her name, she supposes, but telling them she’s the King’s sister will only lead to questions upon questions. She decides to remain anonymous, and when the captain asks, she says only that her name is Cat.

That night, the captain offers up his own quarters for her use, but she declines, choosing instead to curl up on a heap of damaged sailing cloth tucked out of the way on the deck. She spends the night staring up at the stars, and watching the sailor on watch pace the deck as far from her as he can manage without pitching himself overboard.

In the morning, they sail for Oldtown.

Whispering Sound is crowded with vessels when they arrive in the late afternoon — fishing boats of every shape and size, merchants' ships from Essos, and even a few rugged Ironborn longships. The clear sky is thick with shrieking gulls and speckled seabirds and massive pelicans that swoop around the ship’s sails to dive and pluck fish from the sea.

Watching from the deck as the city grows nearer and the crew steers the ship towards a berth, Arya expects she might feel disappointed or aggrieved to return to the shores of Westeros, but she doesn’t. Instead, she feels curiously blank, and then relieved, once she walks down the creaking gangplank and plants her feet solidly on the pier.

Arya tries again to offer the captain some gold, but he refuses, sterner this time, and bids her a firm farewell. The fisherman who brought her aboard the dinghy the previous day offers her a place to stay the night.

"I've a good wife waiting for me there, so you needn't worry yourself about any mischief from me," he says, lighting a dirty old clay pipe and cackling a wheezy laugh.

Arya accepts, and follows him into the city.

Oldtown is as beautiful as Arya has always heard, its stone walls rising over the Sound, the Citadel stalwart against the skyline. The air rings with the sound of laughter, and with folk shouting in many languages as the fisherman leads her through a bustling market. The city’s sheltering shape and closeness to the sea creates a buffer to the cool inland winter winds, allowing hardy green vines to still grow and tumble down the stone walls and into the alleyways.

The fisherman's home is humble, just two rooms down a dark wynd. Shame swirls sickly in the pit of Arya’s stomach, taking what little he and his wife have when she might have had every comfort at her disposal back in Winterfell.

Arya offers the fisherman and his wife some gold for the roof over her head, but they refuse. The couple are hospitable and insistent about it, sitting her in front of their hearth and feeding her as many bowls of creamy fish soup and crusts of bread as she can stomach. She eats until her belly aches, while the man smokes his pipe and the woman heats a pan of water for Arya to wash with.

As she tries to fall asleep that night in front of the dwindling fire, clean and warm and dry at last, she thinks of her father. She wonders what he'd make of his daughter, now. What he would make of a willful girl grown into a reckless woman. Her throat tightens with grief and shame.

_It doesn’t matter. Dead is dead. Dead is nothing._

Eventually, she sleeps.

In the morning, they eat a breakfast of salted fish and fried bread, and a tea made from blackberry leaves. The fisherman bids Arya farewell. He doesn’t ask her to leave, but doesn’t give her leave to stay, either, so after he goes, Arya helps the woman wash up and sweep the floors in thanks for their generosity.

“Will you be headin’ back to your people, then?” the woman asks as she brushes the hearth and fills the ashcan. Arya stops sweeping the floor to look at her. “You sound Northern, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right. Not sure I’m going to go back to the North, though. Not yet, anyway.”

The woman laughs, showing a wide gap in her smile, her brown eyes shining warmly in her wrinkled face.

“Hidin’ out from an unpleasant betrothal, are you?”

Arya gapes at her. The woman’s smile is much too knowing for Arya’s comfort, but is also, somehow, not particularly threatening.

“No,” she says, finally. “I’m not betrothed.”

“Hm,” says the woman, raising both eyebrows. “The dregs in your teacup said different, and I know a highborn lady’s way of talkin’ when I hear it. But it could be I’m gettin’ dull in my old age.”

The woman lifts her shoulders and leaves it be, unbothered, attending to her chores as Arya collects her few things.

Before Arya goes, the woman gives her a wool cloak and a pair of shoes she says used to belong to her daughter. The cloak is a bit long but the shoes fit Arya almost perfectly and are not very worn at all. When Arya asks the woman why her daughter has no need of them, the woman’s kind eyes go sad, and she simply shakes her head.

The woman bids her farewell and disappears into the bedroom, leaving Arya to show herself out. She does, but first she removes several of the coins from the little sack of gold and tucks them into her pocket. She leaves the rest of the gold in the sack, and places it on the mantel.

Arya purchases a large piece of hard cheese and some bread and dried apples at the market, then makes her way to the city’s stone walls.

As she passes through the city gate, she thinks of Winterfell and Sansa. She thinks of King's Landing and her little brother Bran, the king. Both of them rebuilding what has been destroyed. She thinks of Jon, beyond the Wall, among the wildlings.

She thinks of a wind and rain-battered kingdom on the far coast of Westeros, and its new Lord.

Arya walks out onto the Roseroad, where the rambling roses that cling to the fences and stone walls have all turned brown, dormant in the winter cold.

Arya goes east.


	2. the black rose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look, I haven't abandoned this story! If you're still reading, thank you for being patient between updates. I hope to make the wait worth your while in time. I do not offer an update schedule because I'm trying not to make promises I can't keep. Just know that I'm working away on the next part and everything after that as frequently and diligently as I'm able.
> 
> Thanks to M and Lisa for the cheerleading, hand-holding, and the edits, always the edits. <3
> 
> Just as a reminder for context and to help manage your expectations: I'm writing strictly based on the events and characterizations presented in the TV series, not the books. This Arya is TV Arya, not book Arya, and this story is just leaning into that and trying to make sense out of it all.
> 
>  **Warnings:** This chapter contains some sexual harassment and a scene of canon-typical violence.

**II  
_the black rose_**

Arya travels as far as the outskirts of Bitterbridge in the Reach before she runs out of coin.

There’s an inn a few miles outside of town where she stops one freezing night for a bowl of stew. The battered sign out front reads _The Black Rose_ , and the place is grimy inside from smoke and candle soot. It’s full of people when she enters. She sits at a table in a corner, her back to the wall, and slowly eats the entire bowl of gamey stew. It’s a relief to warm her hands and feet, and to lean against the wall and watch the other patrons drink while the two barmaids weave amongst them, their hands laden with mugs of ale.

Arya’s been walking for three weeks.

Three weeks of sleeping under bridges and in drafty haymows and hollow trees, of snaring scrawny rabbits, of drinking from iced-over brooks. She’s exhausted and her shoes are wearing through. Winter has made hunting and foraging difficult – impossible, at times – and she’s had to watch copper after copper disappear for crusts of bread and bowls of stew. She estimates it’s perhaps another week’s walk until the Roseroad meets the Kingsroad.

“You drinkin’, my dear?”

Arya looks up to find one of the serving girls standing beside the table. She’s a bit older than Arya, and she’s slender, with chestnut hair and brown eyes set in a pretty face. There are shadows beneath her eyes, though, and now that she’s standing close, Arya notices that the server’s belly is round with a babe.

“I don’t often drink. I like to keep a clear head.”

The girl’s expression loses some of its good humour, and she raises one dark eyebrow.

“You’ll have to take up the custom if you plan to warm that bench much longer,” she says.

“I’ll take an ale, then.” Arya withdraws the last copper from her pouch.

The girl takes it and nods. Arya watches her make her way through the crowd of patrons to the bar, a battered wooden countertop backed by casks of Dornish wine and shelves crowded with pewter flagons.

Once the girl returns with her ale, Arya sips the bitter drink slowly. The patrons get drunker, and she sees how much coin the serving girls pocket as they slap men’s hands away from their skirts. The tavern is a busy one that does a steady trade.

The night wears on and soon the last drinkers are shuffled out the door by the large, gruff man who’s been tending the bar all night. One serving girl gathers mugs and bowls onto a wide tray while the other wipes the tables down, and a third, older woman emerges from the kitchen in the back. She’s a big beauty with thick, strong arms, and she joins the serving girls in their work for only a moment before her keen, dark eyes find Arya still sitting in the corner.

She comes to Arya’s table, and looks down at the half-inch of warm ale sitting stagnant in the bottom of her mug. She raises an eyebrow.

“Closin’ up. You’ll have to take a room or be on your way.”

“Do most inns in these parts close for the night?” Arya cups a hand around her mug and pulls it closer to her. The woman’s eyes follow her movement.

“This one does. We lock up tight as a drum at night, since the troubles.”

“You’ve had a busy night.”

The woman tilts her head and furrows her brow.

“Not particularly. And we’re closed now.”

“That many patrons is usual, is it? It’s a wonder your serving girls manage to keep pace, especially the lass with a babe on the way.”

The woman’s face changes. She looks Arya up and down, and the slightest hint of a smirk enters her expression.

“Out with it,” she says.

Arya decides that she likes this woman.

“I’m looking for work, and I’ve no place to stay.”

The woman’s brow creases.

“That so? And why’s that my concern?”

“As I said, I noticed your bar-maid has a babe on the way. I’m quick on my feet and stronger than I look, and I can chop firewood and wash dishes and scrub floors as well as anyone.” 

The woman looks her up and down again, her eyes narrowing.

“Not sure about those little arms of yours, but I can see you’re quick-minded, and you’re pretty enough to keep a fellow’s arse on a barstool, to be certain. Can you do sums?”

“Yes, and I can read and write, as well.”

“Hmph. We’ll know soon enough if you’re lying. You can serve tomorrow, and we’ll see about it. Now, believe you said you’ve no place to stay, is that right?”

Arya nods. 

“I need a room for the night, if you’ve got one, or I can sleep in that stable out back.”

The woman heaves a massive sigh, and waves a hand as though she’s batting a fly.

“Must be gettin’ soft in my dotage.” She tilts her head and raises an eyebrow at Arya. “You can have a bed for the night if you help close up and get us all in our beds faster. How’s that?”

Arya drains the dregs of her ale and stands, gathering her mug and bowl before following the woman to the bar.

“I’m Katell,” the woman says, coming to rest one elbow on the bar. She nods to the tall, dark-haired man wiping it down with a rag. “And this handsome fellow is my husband, Tamhas. Keep your hands to yourself and we’ll get along fine.”

The man looks at Arya and squints.

“A little blade for a little lass,” he says. Arya puts her mug and bowl down on the bar and drops her hand protectively to Needle’s hilt.

“That’s right,” she says.

“You know how to use it?”

“There wouldn’t be much sense in carrying it with me if I didn’t.” 

The man throws his head back and laughs, a hearty, booming sound that makes Arya smile. 

"You've got me cornered there, lass."

Katell calls the serving girls over. The one who served Arya is Delmy, and the other girl, a yellow-haired young woman with a bright smile, is Bitta.

When Katell asks her name, Arya blinks.

“Nan,” she says. “My name’s Nan.”

The five of them make quick work of the night’s chores, and soon the tavern is cleared and swept, the fire banked and the candles extinguished. Tamhas sees Delmy and Bitta out into the cold night, and bars the door behind them.

Katell shows Arya to a little room off the back of the kitchen. The room smells of tallow and onions and smoke, but it’s warm from the kitchen fire and it fits a little cot. It’s many times more comfortable than a haymow or the exposed, rocky shore of an island. It’s better than sleeping in the woods amongst rapers and thieves, or in a piss-stinking pigpen in the pouring rain, surrounded by the shrieks of the tortured and the dying, or in her hard, narrow bed in the House of Black and White, or blind and alone in the streets.

“There’s nought worth stealing, so don’t bother turning the place upside down, would you?”

Arya nods and Katell leaves her.

Arya looks around the dark room for a moment, then removes Needle from her belt and sets the sword beside the bed before climbing in herself.

She falls asleep quickly, and does not dream. When she wakes in the dark morning, she hears Tamhas humming to himself in the kitchen, and smells mossy woodsmoke and baking bread.

When she wakes, she’s not afraid.

***

Once she proves herself a quick learner, Katell and Tamhas let Arya stay on.

They pay her fairly, and take only a small amount for her board once they realise she’s an early riser who doesn’t mind getting up before them to light the kitchen fire and start the bread to break their fast. 

Serving the travellers who stay at The Black Rose is strange at first. Arya relished talking to new people, once, and she used to be able to befriend anyone. It’s awkward to try to be that way again, to ask folk where they’re from and where they’re headed, to listen to their stories while she pours their ale. 

She’s no longer accustomed to listening just to listen, to be curious.

Arya parrots little lies she’s made up about Nan to hold up her end of conversations. There are too many complications that come with being herself, of course. Arya Stark is the sister of the Lord of the Six Kingdoms and the Queen in the North, a princess twice over. It’s easier to be Nan and tell folk she’s an orphan from the Crownlands.

No one ever seems to doubt her. She’s still very good at this particular game.

Delmy gives her an old dress that’s too big in the chest and long in the skirt. Arya trips on the hem until she gets into the habit of tucking the excess skirt up in her waistband, at her hip. Still, it’s a far sight easier than trying to part drunkards from their coin in trousers and a tunic.

She learns quickly the exact amount of force needed to keep a man’s hands to himself, but not so much that he’ll put up a fuss or quit reaching for his coin purse. She finds that bending a couple of wandering fingers back with one hand is usually just right, as long as she smiles while she does it.

Nearly everyone who enters The Black Rose comes bearing news or rumours, and Arya learns much this way. 

There’s talk of rebellion in Dorne and in the Iron Islands. King’s Landing is being rebuilt and the Iron Bank is providing the gold to do it. The Master of Coin has been imprisoned for skimming gold off the realm’s coffers. Folk in the Crownlands are discontent because Bran the Broken is from the independent kingdom of the North, not part of the Six Kingdoms at all. The fearsome dragon that burnt half of King’s Landing to cinders has been spotted off the coast at Runestone. 

The Queen in the North is beloved by her people. The Lord of the Six Kingdoms and the rumours of his strange gifts are feared.

When a drunkard calls Jon Snow _Queenslayer_ , Arya breaks two of his fingers and has Tamhas toss him out.

When folk speak of Arya Stark, they call her _Dawnbringer_ , and she always finds somewhere else to be before she has to hear any more.

There are bandits and outlaws on the roads. Skirmishes break out between one Lord's bannermen and another's. Lords die and their sons take their place. Heirs are born. Betrothals are made and broken, vows taken and betrayed, oaths sworn and forsaken, and all of it is fodder for the tales the smallfolk tell over drinks at the end of each day.

But Arya does not hear anything of the resurrected House Baratheon and the Lord of Storm’s End. 

It’s just as well. News is nearly always bad, after all, so she’d rather hear nothing and tell herself that he is well. That he, like her, is much too occupied to ever be something so foolish as _lonely_. That he is a good lord, like she’d hoped. Like she’d told him he would be.

She tells herself that he is safe and better off.

Sometimes she even believes it.

***

Tavern work is hard, and Arya’s feet and arms ache when she collapses onto her cot at the end of each night. Sometimes the smoky air and the glare of the candles and the cacophony of raised voices is too great, and she stumbles through the evening’s work and goes to sleep with headaches that leave her feeling disoriented and seasick.

But life in a tavern is still easier than other work she's done. It’s not dashing up and down the dark, winding staircases of Harrenhal. It’s not cleaning blood and filth from the dead. It’s not peddling stinking shellfish back and forth across a wharf in the hot sun. It’s not begging blind in the streets. 

It’s not killing. It’s not butchering.

Even better, it comes with a roof over her head and people she likes.

Tamhas and Katell’s room is right over the kitchen, and they don’t seem to be shy about Arya overhearing them at night. It’s annoying, but she can hardly begrudge them their pleasure. The moaning and groaning and the creaking of their bed on the floorboards is tiresome, but it’s the laughter that’s the worst. They laugh together, and it makes Arya’s chest go tight.

_Gendry had smiled against her mouth, laughing –_

Arya doesn't cover her ears with her pillow, though, because she likes it afterwards, when their voices go soft and she can hear them speaking to one another. She can't hear their words, just the rise and fall of their muffled voices, and she's glad – to hear the words themselves would ruin it, somehow.

Winterfell’s walls were too thick to allow much sound to travel between its bedchambers. But Arya remembers footsteps and hushed voices in the corridor outside her chamber door: the guards and serving girls and Septa Mordane speaking to each other quietly after Arya had been made to go to bed. There was always someone up and about in Winterfell. Sometimes, if she was very lucky, she'd hear mother and father on their way to their own chamber for the night, and get to hear their low voices as they passed her door. 

The sound of voices from upstairs is comforting, and it’s a gentler way to fall asleep than Arya has known for years.

Three turns of the moon pass. Arya saves every copper she earns in a little sack she hides inside a tear in her straw mattress.

Delmy gives birth to her baby. Her regular customers who stop in from Bitterbridge miss her, but they've become acquainted with Nan, the new serving girl, and don't seem to mind giving their spare coins to her instead. 

Arya goes to see the baby girl a week later with Katell and Bitta. The other two bring gifts they’ve made – a little wool dress that draws together at the bottom into a cozy sack from Bitta, and a wee rabbit fur cloak and cap from Katell – and Arya is embarrassed she has nothing to bring. She knows she would have made a sow’s ear out of anything she tried to make, but going empty-handed shames her. Katell hands her a basket that holds a crock of soup and a warm loaf of bread wrapped in linen.

“There, now,” Katell says. “Be cheerful, Nan. No woman who’s just birthed a babe wants to see a frown on a maiden’s face.”

They walk down the muddy lanes, singing “The Dornishman’s Wife” and a few bawdy tavern songs whose lyrics Arya does not know, but she laughs and cheers Bitta and Katell on as they sing about crowing cocks and soggy bottoms.

Delmy lives with her husband Gilwyn and his parents, in a little stone cottage set back from a narrow lane. 

The cottage is close and dark inside, but warm, and Delmy’s family greets them happily. Gathered before the fireplace, the three visitors take turns holding the new babe while the family looks on, their tired faces beaming. Arya goes last, and when Bitta carefully places the tiny bundle in her arms and Arya cradles the tiny girl to her chest, she’s struck by a memory long buried in the crypt of her childhood.

She remembers holding Rickon the morning after he was born.

She remembers her parents, both of them weary and joyful. She remembers Rickon’s tiny, perfect nose and his pinched, pink face, and the auburn eyebrows and lashes that somehow looked exactly like Sansa’s, but in miniature.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Arya hands the baby back to Gilwyn, muttering a clumsy compliment before turning quickly away.

Outside, snow is falling.

The cold air stings her damp cheeks, but if Katell and Bitta notice she’s been crying when they come outside several minutes later, neither of them says so. They’re quiet on the walk back to the inn, but halfway there, Bitta reaches over and hooks her arm through Arya’s, and gives her hand a gentle squeeze.

***

“I hope you won’t take it wrong, but I reckon you’d finish the night with more coin in your pockets if you'd let ‘em see a bit more of you,” Bitta says one night as she’s wiping down the long bar while Katell and Tamhas count the night’s earnings in the kitchen.

Arya, stacking stools and chairs up on the tables, doesn’t look over.

“I doubt that’d make a difference.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there isn’t much more to see under my dress.”

Bitta scoffs. Arya glances up to see Bitta scrubbing away at a spot on the surface of the bar, her brow knit.

“You’ve a lovely figure, Nan! There are girls with more to hold onto, to be sure, but you shouldn’t let that worry you none. You’ve got a bright, pretty face, and you move through the crowds like a dancer. Men’s eyes follow you.”

Arya’s face goes hot. She grabs the broom from where it leans against the bar, and begins to sweep under the tables.

“It’d be hardly any trouble at all to nip that dress in here and there and show you off better. Are you handy with a needle and thread?”

Grimacing down at the small pile of dust and debris gathered by her feet, Arya shakes her head.

“Not particularly.”

Arya sweeps the whole tavern floor while Bitta takes the last of the dirty mugs and bowls back to the kitchen. When Arya stands up from whisking all the dirt into a dustpan, Bitta is back at the bar, leaning on her elbows and watching Arya.

“Nan, you know how to read, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“If I were to fix that dress up just right for you, would you teach me? Katell has shown me a bit, but I should like to learn it proper.”

Bitta’s face is guileless and uncertain, and it’s clear that she’s nervous, and has had to work up the courage to ask.

The thought of Bitta cutting away the baggy fabric of her dress makes Arya long for her trousers and tunic, discomfort swirling in the pit of her stomach, but she also knows Bitta typically leaves the tavern at the end of the night with twice the coin Arya earns.

“All right,” she says.

Bitta exclaims her delight, and demands that she be allowed to take Arya’s dress home with her that very night. They hurry through the last of the evening’s chores, and then Arya stands on an empty apple crate while Bitta kneels before her, brow knit, as she gathers the dress here and there and pins it.

Three nights serving drinks in her tunic and trousers and earning scarcely anything is enough to convince Arya she’s done the smart thing.

When Bitta returns the dress, it doesn’t seem much different to Arya until she puts it on.

It hugs Arya’s body and exposes more of her neck, chest, and arms. Bitta shows her how to make her chest look larger, too, tucking rags inside her smallclothes and pushing her breasts up towards her collarbone. It’s uncomfortable and feels rather like one of the costumes she wore in Braavos. It helps to think of it that way, in fact – it’s the costume worn by Nan the tavern girl. It has little to do with Arya Stark at all.

The first night she wears the dress, she pockets more silver stags than any night previous, and more than one fellow in his cups offers to take her upstairs to a room.

They offer gold, and for a breath she’s tempted, but she declines. It’s more honest work than many of the ways folk earn their bread, only Arya’s not sure her ability to play a part extends quite that far.

That, and she doesn’t want anyone to see the scars. Not even here, as Nan, where no one knows her. 

It’s bad enough that Gendry knows. Even if he doesn’t know the ugly story behind them, he’s still seen them. He’s still seen her bare skin and touched the hair between her legs. He’s touched the inside of her and tasted the spit in her mouth, and smiled and spoke soft words into her ears the whole time he was doing it.

Sometimes it shocks her that she let him that close.

She only allowed it because she believed they were both going to die. She only did any of it because she was so happy to see him ride up to Winterfell with Jon, to see that he was still alive, after all the years that had passed since the red woman took him away.

She didn't know they'd both survive. She didn't know he'd go and do something so stupid as think himself in love with her.

So when men ask, some more politely than others, she just smiles mildly, shakes her head, and pours them another ale.

***

One afternoon, after a fresh fall of snow, Arya's trudging through the half-frozen mud from the well to the kitchen door when she hears men's voices raised in argument.

Setting the heavy bucket of icy water down by the back step, she walks around the side of the tavern, where she finds two men and a pony standing just off the roadway.

They're both strangers to her, but, judging by their garb, she supposes one is a travelling knight – or at least someone who can afford a knight’s armour – and the other, holding the pony by a ragged lead rope, is a farmer. The pony is a grey nag on the far side of her best years. She stands placidly, lipping frost off the fencepost closest to her low-hanging head, while the men argue.

"I'm not calling you a liar,” the knight says. “I'm saying this isn't the beast you described last night and therefore the price you're asking is outrageous."

"What matter is it to you if she's to be butchered anyway? You’re lookin’ for horseflesh and here it is!"

"The matter is that I'm not paying that much silver for a pony with hardly any meat on her bones."

Arya examines the pony as the two men continue to argue. She’s old, certainly, and looks poorly cared for. But she still seems sound and sturdy, and she’s calm even as the men begin to shout insults at each other.

Eventually the knight turns on his heel and stalks off down the road, muttering to himself, leaving the farmer to curse and spit in the icy mud.

“I’ll buy her,” Arya says, then, coming closer.

“Fuck off,” the farmer scoffs.

Arya’s fingers itch for Needle, and she struggles to keep the scowl off her face.

“I’m not joking. I’ll buy her from you right now.”

“This old mare’s as good as dog meat, you nosy bitch.”

Arya looks around her.

“Planning to grind her up yourself, right here, are you?”

The man glowers at her in silence for several moments, and then exhales.

“Five hundred silver stags,” he says.

Arya laughs, long and hard, and when she quiets, the man is scowling.

“Now _you’re_ joking,” she says. “Poor old thing’s not fit for more than mowing a field. I’ll give you fifty.”

“Three hundred.”

“One hundred fifty.”

The man makes an aggravated sound, and shakes a fist at her.

“Your husband ought to tan your hide.”

Arya scoffs. “I’ve no husband.”

“Your father, then, you mouthy cunt.”

Again, Arya longs for Needle, and decides she really ought to get a dagger to keep hidden in her skirts whenever Needle’s stowed away.

“One hundred fifty silver stags is my final offer to you, and it’s a generous one.”

The man groans and stomps his foot like a child, glaring at her.

“Fine. If it weren’t winter and I weren’t bloody desperate, I’d boot you in your arse myself. Let’s be quick about it before I think too long on how I’ve let a young lass swindle me.”

Arya hurries off to fetch the silver from her room behind the kitchen. While the man stands there and painstakingly counts the stags, Arya goes to the pony and holds her palm out flat for the mare to nuzzle.

“Does she have a name?”

The man doesn’t reply. He slips the coins into a pouch at his belt, gives Arya a final sour look, and stomps off through the snow and mud.

Arya unties the pony from the fence and leads her behind the inn to the small stable that houses Katell and Tamhas’s gentle brown cow, Bluebell. She ties the pony to an iron loop on the wall and quickly pitches straw into the empty, cobwebbed corner stall, then leads the pony in.

Arya feeds her a bucket of oats and drops a healthy armful of hay into the stall. She fetches the bucket she’d filled earlier at the well and brings it to her, then brushes the dirt and dried sweat off the old mare’s body with a stiff brush and a piece of sacking. The pony heaves several deep, contented sighs as she fills her belly, and groans when Arya scratches between her flicking ears.

Underneath the layer of dirt, the pony is much lighter in colour than Arya realised, a soft silvery-white, with freckles of darker grey.

The colour reminds her of a cloak her mother once had. It was thick, dove grey wool with a broad collar of silverfox and ermine, and along the hems, little rushing rivers and leaping fish embroidered in pale silver thread. Arya remembers how the tiny shapes of them felt under her fingertips.

The colour reminds her of home.

“I’m going to call you Thread.”

The pony exhales hugely into her bucket of oats, sending dust and chaff flying around her head.

“Nan! Where have you got to with that water, girl?”

It’s Katell hollering from the kitchen door. Arya winces.

She strokes Thread’s ears once more, then shuts the stable door and hurries away to fetch a fresh pail of water for the kitchen. As she goes, she rehearses how she plans to tell Katell and Tamhas about the pony she’ll be keeping in their stable.

***

Another three turns of the moon pass.

Arya serves ale and chops firewood and, most nights, reads with Bitta until they’re so tired that the script on the parchment goes blurry before their eyes. She spends her free mornings in the stable with Thread, feeding her dried apples and brushing her thick coat.

Thread’s gained so much muscle and fat that Arya has to press her fingers into the pony’s sides to feel her ribs. Her brown eyes are brighter and she tosses her head in a happy greeting whenever Arya walks into the stable.

Arya takes Thread for bareback rides along the frosted banks of the River Mander, through snowy meadows and farmers’ fields. Thread proves herself a steady, startle-proof mount, though she’s not a pony anyone would call swift or spirited.

Early one morning as they ride down the muddy lane, back to The Black Rose, Arya hears the song of a bird she hasn't heard in a long time. Indeed, she’s sure she hasn’t heard it since she left Westeros for Braavos, in the twilight of the long summer.

She stops and swivels her head around, trying to find where the bird is perched.

The breeze brushes the bare skin of her face, and it isn’t bitter. It’s still cold, but it’s gentler, somehow. Sunlight beams from behind the grey clouds. As it does, Arya feels its warmth touch her skin, and she wonders if this could be the first whisper of spring, something she has never known.

She wonders if this is winter dying, and spring being born in its place.

Arya returns to the inn, the bird’s song following her and the sun glaring off the snow, into her eyes. 

That night, her feet and back aching from hours of slinging ale, her temples strained from forcing smiles all evening, she crouches beside her bed and pulls out her little sack of coins and counts. She hasn’t saved much since she bought Thread, just the extra coppers men leave on the tables for her.

Still, she has enough coin. More than enough, really; it’s less than a week’s ride to the Kingsroad. It’s just a few days farther to King’s Landing, and Bran could no doubt arrange passage for her to White Harbour and Winterfell.

Only she does not want to go to King’s Landing, or to Winterfell. She does not even wish to go north to see Jon. She should be eager to see her brothers and her sister. She should be eager to return home, but she isn’t.

Arya bundles her coins up and tucks them back inside her mattress. She removes her overclothes and blows out her candle, and she stares up at the darkness for a long time before she finally falls asleep.

A week later, a traveller to the inn brings word that white ravens have been spotted flying east out of Oldtown.

***

Winter dies slowly, but it does die.

More travellers begin to use the Roseroad, and the tavern grows busier with every day that passes. Arya and the others are run off their feet until Delmy returns to work. Then, at least, there are two more hands for the many tasks that each day demands of them.

It doesn’t snow anymore, but it rains. The inn’s stableyard turns into a quagmire of freezing mud as the winter snows melt and run. The smaller roads and country lanes that branch off the Roseroad become impassable, breaking cart wheels in the deep, muddy ruts. The River Mander swells and breaches its banks, and they hear news of flooding in all of the lowlands south of the Neck. There are tales of inattentive children drowning, and of sheep and cattle being swept away by the rushing waters, only to be found safe and dry many miles away. 

The nights stay chilly, and Arya still shivers when she crouches in the dark kitchen each morning and stokes the cookfire.

Arya works, takes her meals with Tamhas and Katell, exercises Thread, and sleeps every night in her cot. The headaches don't come as often as they did, and she sleeps well.

She sleeps well but for the nightmares.

At times she’s clinging to Baelor’s stone legs as the crowd howls for her father’s head. At times she cowers in the muddy pens at Harrenhal, listening to the screams. At times she's begging in the dark and she can't walk a block without stumbling. Strangers step on her and trip over her, sending her sprawling, and a wooden pole as unforgiving as iron splits her lip and knocks her teeth loose. 

Worst of all are the bells. She dreams of the desperate clanging of the bells, the roar of fire and stone crumbling all around her, and the stench of charred flesh. And always the bells.

She dreams so many dreams where she feels small, again, frightened and furious and terribly _small_.

Then one night she dreams of a meadow in the midst of a shadowy wood. The meadow is quiet and peaceful, but the woods are eerily dark. She can hear the sound of the sea as it crashes against a rocky shore.

She is not alone in the meadow. On the far side, picking its way through the tall tangles of grass and wildflowers, is a single stag.

The creature is stunning. It’s massive, carrying a marvelous rack of antlers at the top of its strong neck. Its ruddy hide is thick for winter. The stag is not grazing, but standing still, staring off into the dark woods. A thick plume of steam escapes its wide nostrils, and it flicks one ear.

Arya approaches and still the stag does not move.

A movement to her right catches her eye, and she sees shapes moving in the woods. She cannot see what they are, but she knows they’re there. They’re watching the stag. They’re watching her, too.

The stag turns its great head, staring at her for a long moment, and then it turns from her and begins to walk steadily toward the woods.

Arya tries to call out to the creature to warn it away, but her voice stops in her throat, and no sound emerges.

She wakes up gasping in the dark, soaked in cold sweat.

***

One rainy night, Arya leaves.

It's been a hectic evening. Neither Arya nor the other girls have had a moment to catch their breath, too busy fetching flagons of ale and bowls of stew and thick slices of warm bread.

Arya pours ales and wines at the bar while Tamhas goes down the cellar to fetch more casks and Bitta and Delmy dash all over, waiting on the noisy, impatient drinkers that crowd around every table in the place.

Arya's filling a flagon for Bitta when a man's voice reaches her ears over the din, and for once actually captures her full attention.

“– hardly care that some dead, mad Targaryen legitimized the bastard before she burnt King’s Landing to the ground. He’s nobody, to them.”

She turns her head sharply. The man attached to the voice is sitting down the bar, speaking to a bored-looking older man beside him.

The older man says something too quietly for Arya to hear, and the loud man barks an obnoxious laugh.

“By whose authority? The lad says he’s Robert Baratheon’s bastard, but that old whoremonger must have had bastards all over the Seven Kingdoms, and not even that clever snake Cersei Lannister could have done for them all. The only person who wanted the lad made the Lord of Storm’s End is dead.”

Arya turns from the patron she'd been about to serve and goes to the end of the bar, ignoring the indignant shout behind her.

"What can I get for you, my good men?"

The man who'd been speaking and the bored-looking fellow both look at her, and the latter speaks first.

"Ale."

Arya nods.

"And you?"

The first man’s grin is wide and his eyes are bleary, and he orders the same.

Arya turns away and fetches them each an ale as quickly as she can. As soon as she brings them, the older man takes the flagon, slaps his coins on the bar, and makes a hasty departure without another word.

As she pockets the coppers, Arya fixes a smile on her face.

“What brings you to the Roseroad?”

“On my way to Oldtown,” the man replies, apparently eager to have her attention. “I’m an acolyte. I’ve been visiting family in the Stormlands, but I’m returning to the Citadel now to complete my chain and take my vows.” 

The man grins, his cheeks red and his eyes bright. He's drunk. Arya puts one hand on her hip and cocks her head.

“Shame for the Stormlands to lose such a fine man.”

It shouldn’t be so easy to manipulate a person, but somehow, it is. His ale-soaked smile sags into a smirk and he puffs out his chest.

“I’m not too humble to say that maidens all over the Stormlands wept in the road as I passed.”

Arya smiles without showing her teeth.

“Well, I reckon I’m a lucky girl, indeed,” she says. She raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes. “I’ve never been to the Stormlands.”

The man makes a sound of disgust.

"Nothing but rain and wind, and folk so proud and temperamental they'll challenge you if you so much as overtake them in the road. Fools, the lot of them."

“What of the new Lord of Storm’s End? He’s not from the Stormlands. Perhaps his temper differs.”

The man chortles and takes a long draw from his flagon of ale.

“What, Baratheon’s bastard?”

“The same,” Arya says, the muscles of her face aching under the strain of her false smile.

The man shakes his head.

“I’m surprised the bastard’s lived to see spring,” he says with a chuckle. “They say he’s as coarse as any whore’s son. He has scarce allies and there are many lords with better claims to Storm’s End than a dead drunkard’s unacknowledged bastard. He won’t survive the year; I’d wager a dozen gold dragons on it.”

Arya’s chest clenches painfully, her heart pounding hard and her ears hot. She wants to grab the man by his ear and slam his head to the battered bartop. She wants to poke Needle into the tenderest part of his throat until he squeals like a dying hog, until he weeps and begs and tells her the name of every last lord who intends Gendry harm.

"By the Seven, Nan, we're about to have a bloody riot on our hands! Quit flirting and sling some ale!"

Delmy’s exasperated voice shakes Arya out of her dark thoughts.

“Will that be all for you?”

“I’ll have another ale,” he says before downing his drink. As Arya turns to fetch him a fresh ale, she’s stopped by his hand grasping the back of her skirt. He tugs her back hard, and she clips her hip painfully against the edge of the bar as she turns to him.

“Might have a bit of you, later, as well,” he says, not bothering to keep his voice low. His hand finds the curve of her backside and he grabs her there, his fingers digging into her flesh. “What are you, a few coppers?”

Just like that, Arya finds she has had her fill of men’s hands on her skirts. She’s had her fill of being Nan, the orphan barmaid.

Arya’s got the man’s wrist twisted in a blink, and she slams his hand down on the bartop. The man yelps like a kicked cur, and the drinkers crowding the bar turn to gape at the commotion. The man swings his free arm clumsily to hit her, and she rears back, but the blow she’s dodging never has a chance to connect.

Tamhas is standing at her side, the man’s forearm caught in his massive fist. He looks down at her.

“I’ve got this one,” Tamhas says lightly. He tips his head in the direction of the kitchen door. “Go on and find yourself a breath of fresh air. Can’t have the barmaids cutting off fools’ fingers with their little swords – it isn’t good for trade.”

Arya releases the man’s wrist. She gives Tamhas a tight smile she hopes conveys some measure of her gratitude, and he nods to her again, his expression kind but firm.

“Go on, lass.”

Arya turns and goes quickly to the blazing hot kitchen. There she finds Katell, sweaty and red-faced, removing a tray of loaves from the oven and placing them on the table. She looks up at Arya’s appearance.

“Seven Hells. Are there another thirty orders for stew, now, or what?”

Arya shakes her head.

“No. Tamhas sent me back to catch my breath.”

“Ah,” Katell says, a knowing expression settling on her face. She wipes the sweat from her brow with her apron, then removes the ragged garment and tosses it onto the table. “I’ll go pour ale. You stir the stew and mind you don’t let it burn, or I’ll take it out of your hide.”

Arya nods and goes to the fire, knowing that Katell is _mostly_ joking.

Katell hurries out the door, leaving Arya alone.

She picks up the large wooden paddle and stirs the stew simmering in a large iron kettle in the fireplace. When she’s given it a good going-over, she hangs the paddle up and bends down on her hands and knees to check the low, glowing embers beneath the kettle. The fire doesn’t need anything; Katell’s got it right where it needs to be. 

When Arya stands up, she finds that her head swims, and her hands are shaking.

_He won’t survive the year._

Her dream comes back to her: the stag and the whispering voices in the woods.

Arya swallows down the tight feeling in her chest.

She looks over at the doorway to her dim little chamber, and thinks about the small sack of coins shoved inside her mattress. She thinks about Thread’s sturdy legs and bright eyes.

Arya does not have a plan. She does not have a goal. She hasn’t for a very long time, now.

She knows only that Gendry does not deserve an ugly, treacherous death like the one her father suffered.

She goes back to the entrance to the kitchen, peering around the corner into the main room. Katell’s with Tamhas behind the bar, pouring ale and laughing her big, crackling laugh at something a grinning patron has said. A few feet away, Tamhas is passing a tray laden with full flagons to Bitta over the bar. On the far side of the room, close to the glowing fireplace, Delmy’s serving a trio of men.

Arya steps backwards, away from the bright, noisy room and back into the empty kitchen.

They don’t need her. 

Delmy was replaced easily enough, before, and they’ll replace Arya just as quickly. She doubts she’ll even be missed, except perhaps by Bitta, whose reading has come along so well that she hardly asks Arya for help with difficult words anymore.

They don’t need her. But someone else might.

Arya spends the rest of the night in the kitchen assisting Katell with the food, only leaving a few times to take trays of full flagons to tables where the drinkers eye her with some fear.

No one touches her again.

Hours later, when the last customer has staggered out the door, when the place is as clean as it will ever be, when Bitta and Delmy have gone off into the cool spring night, Tamhas and Katell climb the creaking stairs up to their bed. 

Arya is alone.

After banking the kitchen fire, Arya sits on the edge of her bed in the darkness, and she waits.

She supposes she ought to have bid them all a proper farewell. She ought to at least have come up with a kind lie. But she doesn’t.

Instead, she waits until Tamhas and Katell’s voices have fallen silent. Once they have, she stands and takes Needle out from under her cot. She reaches her hand deep into the mattress’s straw stuffing to withdraw her sack of coins. After changing into her tunic and trousers, she rolls her dress up small and tucks it inside a flour sack that she ties to her belt. She wraps her wool cloak around herself.

She stands for a moment and looks about the room to ensure she hasn’t missed anything. There’s nothing; it looks just as it did the night she arrived. 

It’s as though she was never here at all.

Arya goes to the larder and takes two small loaves, a hunk of cheese, and a small bag of dried apples. She counts a few coppers out of her coins and leaves them on the shelf.

When she leaves, she closes the door carefully, without a sound, before dashing across the muddy yard to the stable.

Thread watches, looking perplexed, as Arya fills a small sack with oats and packs it in the bag hanging from her belt. 

Arya leads Thread out into the yard, mounts her from the chopping block, and urges her into a quick trot before the pony can even warm up. They’re out of the yard and into the road in a moment, and then Arya squeezes the pony’s sides, hurrying her on.

Arya rides Thread east on the Roseroad, fast, and she does not look back.

***

Deep in the Kingswood, one week later, Arya crosses the invisible border into the Stormlands. There, the sky opens up, and rain pours down.

The canopy of the ancient trees has all but blocked the sunlight as she’s ridden along the Kingsroad. Arya judges it to be midday, but it’s as dark as dusk in the forest.

These woods hide outlaws and bandits. These woods are full of wild creatures. These woods are where kings have met bloody ends.

And now, rain. Rain that pours in great sheets, leaving her damp and shivering in spite of her wool cloak. It reminds her of her ship and the storm, and for a moment, she longs for The Black Rose’s warm kitchen and the spicy mulled wine that Tamhas would make on especially cold nights.

Arya’s teeth start to chatter, and she rides on, looking for a place to wait out the rain. Ahead, near the roadside, she sees a large willow tree on the banks of a rocky brook.

Arya rides Thread to the willow and dismounts before leading the pony through the curtain of bare branches that dangle down almost to the surface of the brook.

It would be better shelter in summer when covered in silvery-green leaves, but it’s the only tree Arya can see that offers any cover at all.

Arya lets Thread have her head, and the pony stretches down with a tired grunt, nosing the ground. Arya rummages about in her bag and offers Thread a piece of dried apple. She eats a piece herself, and the two of them stand beneath the shelter of the willow and listen to the rain falling all around them.

Winter feels far away, here, where the brooks run free of ice and some of the trees even have small buds beginning to swell out from their branches. The rain is cold but the breeze doesn’t bite with frost like it still sometimes did in the Reach.

Spring has really come at last.

Arya eats another few pieces of dried apple, then scoops out a handful of oats for Thread, and feeds it to her, the pony’s muzzle tickling her palm. As they rest, the rain slowly tapers off, until it’s little more than drops falling from the sodden branches of the trees.

Without the sound of the rain pouring down, Arya hears a strange noise.

It sounds like an animal, at first; an injured fox, or a lamb lost from its mother. But Arya holds her breath and listens harder, and realises what it is with a start.

It’s a crying child.

Arya looks down at Thread, who’s gone back to nibbling her way through the leaf litter. She can’t very well go investigate the noise while leading a pony. Arya doesn’t want to tie Thread anywhere, in case wolves come, but she can’t risk her wandering off, either. 

“You’ll stay put, won’t you, girl?” she whispers to Thread. She knots the ends of the pony’s reins and leaves them high on her neck. Thread flicks her ears in mild annoyance, but doesn’t lift her nose from the ground.

Arya turns away and follows the sound of crying, drawing Needle from the thin leather scabbard at her hip.

The crying draws her down the road and over a short log bridge that spans the same little brook she and Thread sheltered beside. The road bends around the base of an enormous old oak, and beyond it, Arya finds a cart with a broken wheel, abandoned, its mule still hitched. The mule is shifting this way and that in the road, struggling to free itself from the cart, nervously tossing its head and showing the whites of its eyes.

“Please, I beg you!”

Arya darts past the mule and the cart, into the trees. The crying has turned to shrieks, and its source is just ahead. Arya ducks low, hiding behind a stand of birches and brush, and peers deeper into the dim woods.

A man is grappling with a shorter woman, standing behind her with one arm around her chest and a knife to her throat as he rummages through a brown leather satchel with his other hand. 

"Please, I beg you – my baby –"

On the cold ground, several feet from them, is a bundle of squirming blankets on the forest floor, the source of the frantic cries.

Arya tightens her grip on Needle.

“Shut your damned mouth or I’ll shut it for you,” the man barks, grunting when the woman thrashes in his grip. He drops the satchel to the ground and punches her in the gut, hard. The woman collapses to her knees, gasping, and as the man goes to stand over her, he turns his back to Arya.

She does not think. She does not hesitate. She just moves.

Arya’s at the man’s side in an instant, and he has only the time to turn his head towards her, his eyes widening in surprise, before she slides Needle in the side of his gut, up into his ribs.

She must nick his heart or his lungs, she reckons, for even as he grabs for her arms, he wheezes and stumbles, coughing bloody spittle onto his chin. The woman has turned around on the ground and is scrambling away from both of them. 

Arya yanks Needle free, and the man falls to his knees, clutching his side. He stares at Arya, his mouth opening and closing as though he’s attempting to speak, but no sound comes out. Only more blood.

He collapses to the ground on his back, and Arya watches his eyes go blank and staring, his last breath leaving his body in a wet hiss.

Arya continues to stand over him, watching blood pool on the muddy ground beside him. 

"By the Seven!”

Arya turns around. The woman is on her feet, the bundle of blankets cuddled close to her chest, the child within still crying. The woman’s face and hands are dirty and her clothes are practically rags. She’s younger than Arya and her large brown eyes are pretty. 

The woman rests her cheek against what Arya guesses must be the child’s head, and sways where she stands, patting the baby’s back with one hand.

“There, poppet, hush now. It’s all right, my love.”

She blinks and makes a strange sound that Arya supposes is a shaky laugh.

“We're fortunate you come along when you did, good woman! I was shaking in my shoes, thinking of what that beast had planned for me and my girl."

Arya looks away, back down at the dead man’s body, and down her arm at the blood dripping off Needle onto the leaves at her feet. Absently, Arya wipes the remaining blood off on the leg of her trousers. 

“I’m Tab,” the woman says. Arya turns back to find Tab watching her, a measure of wariness in her eyes. “This here is my daughter, Kelda.”

The child’s cries have eased into unhappy sniffles, muffled against Tab’s chest. Tab draws the blanket back, and a small, red-headed girl peeks out at Arya, her glaring blue eyes tear-filled. She’s only a baby, perhaps a year old, but her look is fierce, as if she’s angry with Arya for not arriving sooner.

“We were taking the road south to Bronzegate. A fox spooked our mule and the stupid bloody animal broke a wheel. I was looking in the woods for a sturdy stick to fashion a new spoke when that man happened upon us.”

Tab looks about her a moment, then sighs and mutters a soft oath. She shifts Kelda in her arms and turns to walk back through the undergrowth to the road. Arya follows her. As they walk, Tab continues talking.

“These woods are full of bandits. But there’s no other way.”

“What’s in Bronzegate? Have you family there?”

“Oh, no family. It's just me and my Kelda on our own.”

They emerge from the trees to find Tab’s mule tearing the bark from the only sapling within its reach, much calmer than when Arya left it to investigate the woods.

More surprising is Thread, who is standing a few feet away in the road, head hung low as though she’s half asleep. She lifts her head slightly and flicks her ears at Arya.

Kelda fusses, one hand emerging from the blanket to pull on Tab’s loose, messy hair. Tab sits down on one end of the broken cart, and loosens her top to nurse Kelda, who cuddles close to her mother and goes quiet.

Tab cradles her daughter and sighs deeply, her shoulders slumping.

Arya watches them a moment, then takes a long look at the cart. One of its wheels is mangled, two spokes snapped, and the heavy axle has been knocked askew. It will take more than a makeshift spoke made from a sodden tree branch to get the cart moving again.

“I’m riding to Storm’s End,” Arya says. “Would you like to come with me? They ought to be able to offer you some assistance there.”

Tab’s face twists.

“They say the Lord of Storm’s End is an odd one,” she says. “There’s talk he doesn’t get on with the stormlords. Don’t know that I care to get on the bad side of that Baratheon temper. His father was a ruthless one."

Arya looks south down the road, at the dark, wet trees on either side that look like the walls of a long corridor. Ahead, along the roadside, she can see places where new grass is starting to come up. It’s faint, but it’s there, tufts of green growing up from the bed of dead leaves all around.

“I believe he will offer you shelter, at least,” Arya says. “I can see you safely as far as Bronzegate, anyway, and you can decide.”

Tab smiles and nods.

“Don’t see why we shouldn’t travel in a company,” she says cheerfully. She glances down at Kelda. “Let me get this one fed and we can be off.”

Arya goes to the cart and unhitches the mule. She gathers up the few small sacks Tab has, none of them very heavy. She ties the tops of the sacks together and slings them over the mule’s withers. 

A short while later, they’re mounted and on their way, Kelda bundled up inside Tab’s outerwear, her face nestled against her mother’s chest.

They ride abreast and head south.

After some minutes, Tab glances over at Arya. 

"You didn't give your name, good woman."

Arya looks at Tab, and little Kelda, whose red hair is just visible under Tab’s cloak. She smiles, then looks ahead at the road that will take them south, deep into the woods and through the heart of the Stormlands.

"It's Arya,” she says, after a pause. “I'm Arya."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm seriously so sorry that Gendry hasn't shown up yet. Arya had some shit to do on her own, first. You will see him next part, I promise.
> 
> You can find me [on tumblr](https://littlelindentree.tumblr.com/).


End file.
